World-championship-caliber Scrabble☆☆SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the USA by Hasbro Inc., in Canada by Hasbro Canada Corporation, and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc.

2002/01/01 by B. L. Sheppard · 124 citations
Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Sports Analytics and Performance #Digital Games and Media #Championship #Corporation #Intellectual property #Computer science #Operations research #Advertising #Engineering #Business #Political science #Law

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0004-3702(01)00166-7

published in Artificial Intelligence 134(1-2), 241-275 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02

Abstract

Computer Scrabble programs have achieved a level of performance that exceeds that of the strongest human players. Maven was the first program to demonstrate this against human opposition. Scrabble is a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor. The techniques successfully applied in two-player games such as chess do not work here. Maven combines a selective move generator, simulations of likely game scenarios, and the B∗ algorithm to produce a world-championship-caliber Scrabble-playing program.

Citations

• The B∗ tree search algorithm: A best-first proof procedure
• The challenge of poker
• Temporal difference learning and TD-Gammon
• Learning to predict by the methods of temporal differences

Cited by

• Games solved: Now and in the future
• Progress in artificial intelligence [wikipedia]